As much as I am a certified web-app fan, I’m not naive enough to believe I’ll always have 100% broadband availability. Crazy shooters, limited conference availability, or just traveling to less covered areas (and I don’t mean here) – there will be times when we need our documents offline.

That’s why I’m happy to see Zoho Writer get offline editing capabilities today. The offline implementation is based on Google Gears, which, ironically, has yet to show up in Google’s own Apps. This video tutorial walks you through the new features – note, the steps to install Google Gears are obviously required only once. After that, you just click “Go Offline”, and can access your documents at writer.zoho.com/offline. When you’re connected again, click “Go Online” and Zoho will sync your changes back to the original document.

Yes, this is not a perfect solution – yet. Going offline has to be a planned activity since you actively need to click the option while still online; this is the way Google Gears works for now. But life produces unexpected situations, like the other day when I had to hop on a train, and was staring at an empty Google Reader as I had forgotten to click “Offline” at home (Google Reader’s offline capability is also based on Gears). But Zoho never stops enhancing their products, and they plan to tackle auto detecting online/offline status and periodically sync the contents of online and offline documents.

Last but not least, the little birds are singing that the next Zoho announcement will prove that web-based apps can be on par with their desktop counterparts: care to guess which application I am talking about?

OK, I couldn’t resist making fun of Microsoft’s plans to open a giant data center in Irkutsk, Siberia, where winter temperatures can reach -40 degrees. Yes, that’s 40 below zero, and also the temperature where Celsius meets Fahrenheit. As for the real news, read it here:

Update: A little history: other than extreme temperatures, Siberia got her fame as the destination where Russian Tsars exiled criminals or simply their political opponents. Stalin continued this tradition, although he preferred a more direct method: execution.

The Vista-based new screamer clearly runs a lot faster than the 3-year-old laptop running XP, but in reality it’s running at half-speed – the other half eaten by the Operating System. Which proves my earlier argument abut this being a pointless arms race: buying faster and faster machines only so they can maintain themselves and barely let us use basic applications.

There’s a new online Office player in town: Sabeer Bhatia, co-founder of Hotmail, the web-mail service that perfected viral marketing and got acquired by Microsoft for $400 million, unveiled his free web-office suite yesterday. It does not look at Google, Zoho or ThinkFree, it aims at Microsoft directly:

“We are just a few years away from the end of the shrink-wrapped software business. By 2010, people will not be buying software,” Mr Bhatia said. “This is a significant challenge to a proportion of Microsoft’s revenues.”

So be it – I am a certified web-app fanboy. I’m still waiting for my trial account (and wonder if I will ever get it after this post) , so I can’t comment on the applications themselves, but I think Mr. Bhatia’s choice of a name is rather tasteless: Live Documents. What’s wrong with that? Nothing.. except the close resemblance to Microsoft’s Windows Live brand. I only have “conspiracy theories” here:

Live Documents is a shameless rip-off of the MS brand, Mr. Bhatia is literally biting the hand that fed him and indirectly funded this company.

He is riding on Microsoft’s coat-tails: his application is (supposedly) very similar to MS Office 2007, he offers a plug-in to the MS products, uses the MS Office logo quite liberally throughout his site, people know his background with MS – all this creates the impression that his products is somehow jointly developed with Microsoft. (?) While this may help gaining traction initially, I think confusing customers is a very-very bad policy. (But what do I know, I haven’s sold a business for $400M)

Finally, the most far-fetched speculation: this is indeed Microsoft’s secret weapon, named appropriately so it fits easily after it’s absorbed in a $billion+ deal.

It’s definitely Holiday time: slow day, no news, my feed-reader is empty… took a walk outside, did not meet anyone. But for a minute I got confused, thinking we’re heading into April Fools’ Day, not Thanksgiving. It’s all because of Philipp Lenssen’s brilliant post: What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft?

I won’t spoil the fun, I want you to read his piece, here’s just a little teaser. Starting point, regular gmail:

He then rebrands Gmail to something longer, like Windows Live Gmail, change the URL to the more professional looking http://by114w.bay114.gmail.live.com/mail/mail.aspx?rru=home, adds new panes, breaks up messages from conversation threads into their individual parts, adjust the spam filter to be a bit more MS-like … etc. Here’s the final result:

I actually think this last pic is overdone…nevertheless, it’s good reading. Tomorrow Philipp plans to discuss “What if Microsoft had designed Windows Vista.” Artful play with the words. You could read it like this: “What if Microsoft had designed Windows Vista” – but we know that is the case, so that leaves us with the only possible interpretation: “What if Microsoft had designed Windows Vista.”

You read it here first: Zoho must be planning to take over the entertainment business. Need proof? Just watch the promo video for Zoho Creator Mobile version. Gone are the screenshots, canned demos… it’s all Life 2.0

Hm… I hope his sweethearts’s phone number is not real … otherwise he’s got competition for that movie.

On a more serious note: Zoho is mostly known for their Office Suite and are often compared to Google and Microsoft, when talking about documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Database management and application generation are often overlooked, probably since Google does not have anything to offer in these areas. But Zoho does, and in fact that’s the application that attracts the largest active user base. Creator allows non-tech-types (like yours truly) to easily create fairly sophisticated applications, which are often shared by dozens or hundreds of users. There are about 60K (!)applications developed in Creator, used by over half a million people. (Side note: there must be a fair amount of redundancy among 60 thousand applicationss, and while you can share them publicly today, I’d like to see Zoho develop the search / categorization tools to easily locate them; a sort of “marketplace” even if there’s no actual money flow.)

We can’t really talk about Creator without mentioning a related product: Zoho DB. While Creator is an application generator, DB is primarily for data manipulation, analysis and reporting. Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu explains the differences here.

I’m not a security expert, but this warning at the Citicards site was quite a shock:

Customers using comment or blog tracking services on their computers run the risk that information submitted here could be displayed on those websites. Please disable your comment and blog tracking service before using Citi Cards Message Center.

Is this a real danger? What do you think?

Update (11/19): Several commenters here and on TechCrunch confirm what I thought myself: the warning likely refers to “tracking” products that offer a browser plug-in. In this case I was using FireFox with the BlogRovr plugin turned on. I know coComment offers a plugin, and whoever else does … well, Citibank considers it a security risk. Hm… food for thought.

Update #2: Wow, apparently this has been a well-documented problem for at least half a year, so Citi’s solution is to finally put up a warning message.

OK, OK, I get it… it’s the Future of Reading. It will change the world. Yet it’s undeniably ugly.

“This isn’t a device, it’s a service.” True, this is a much more compelling package than the Sony Reader was, but at least that other, “dumber” device had style.

I can’t help but compare to the Seiko-Epson electronic paper display (see below) announced days ago: sheer elegance. Yes, I know, it’s not a complete product, just a display… but somehow I can’t see them turn this display into something that looks like a kitchen appliance.

Wouldn’t it have been cool if Amazon built an e-book reader so inexpensive they could almost give it away for free, then make money by selling e-books for people to read on it (or selling upscale versions of the reader later)? Instead, they stuffed it so full of technological wizardry that it costs $399.

Most people have no idea if they’d really like to use an e-book reader or not. It may be something you just have to experience to grasp. But who’s going to experiment with electronic book reading when the price of entry is so high?

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos says:

“This is the most important thing we’ve ever done..It’s so ambitious to take something as highly evolved as the book and improve on it. And maybe even change the way people read.”